This summer I spent the month of July in Israel visiting family. It seems like every year The Oracle reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict in some respect, and here we go again. What makes this different than most pieces is that my trip coincided, unintentionally, with missiles flying from Gaza into Israel. (No, I am not a Mossad agent.)

For four weeks, just in the town where I was staying, a missile siren would go off an average of three times a day (the sound is close to our tornado warning sirens) After its initial blast, persons in the area have 45 seconds to hurry to a shelter before the incoming missile is expected to reach that town. Most houses and business have a safe room — a reinforced concrete bunker — usually an office, a kid’s room, or a janitor’s closet. You wait inside that room, listen to and feel the blasts of missiles from Gaza shake the walls and floors, and hope this one isn’t one of the five percent that makes it through the Iron Dome’s defense system. The Iron Dome consists of a smattering of high-powered missiles connected to a radar system that reads the trajectory of incoming enemy missiles and sends an Israeli missile to blow the hostile one up while they are both still in the air.

My sister-in-law rents an apartment in the town of Holon. She has three children under the age of two and no bomb shelter. Although most newer homes have bomb shelters, there are many Israelis who don’t have one at all.

In the first three days of the assault this July, my wife, our three young children, and I hustled into the safe room in the town of Gedera every time a missile was headed for that city. (14 times in the first three days of the conflict). Over 900 missiles were fired into Israel in those first three days. By the end of July, the total of missiles fired from Gaza was up to 6,000.

On the second night of the assault, my wife and I decided to go for a walk with our four-year-old. Gedera is a newish town, much more developed than when she had last lived in Israel. We explored the city and its quaint, decidedly middle-eastern neighborhoods, architecture, shops, and flora and fauna. We hesitated before we left, wondering if it was safe. There had been a missile just a few hours earlier. It was a crap shoot whether or not there would be another one.

I said, “It doesn’t really matter, right? There’s the Iron Dome. We’ll be just fine.”

She shrugged and said, “Sure. We’ll be just fine.” She didn’t look as sure as her words implied. I think now she was trying to be brave on my account.

Fifty minutes later, still four blocks away from the house, the sirens went off. We were in the middle of the street and there was no way we were going to get back to the house in forty-five seconds.

My wife grabbed the stroller, hurried to a car parked on the side of the street, ducked behind it, and threw herself over our son, shielding his body with hers. The position is just the kind one can imagine from those nineteen fifties videos explaining how one should act in the event of a nuclear missile strike.

We were on the sidewalk, and on the other side of us was a small brick retaining wall about two feet high. From inside the house I could hear a woman yelling to her son, in Hebrew, to hurry to the safe room. I crouched across from my wife and wondered how the hell her body was going to protect our son if a missile hit the street, or the car, or, God forbid, landed right on us.

It was then that the siren stopped. We could expect a missile and the subsequent booms any second now. I looked up into the sky. The whole world had gone silent. There was no way that we would be safe from whatever came at us. I untucked my arms from behind my head, my blood pumping in my ears and I stared up at the sky. I looked all around. If I was going to die, I wanted to see it coming. I wanted to stare that motherfucker in the eye and give it the bird.

My wife hissed, “Cover your head!”

There was a loud boom that shook the concrete beneath our feet and the windows of the black Citroen that we were huddled against. I saw nothing. There were no more explosions. We laughed nervously at each other and picked up the four year old who was asking us why we stopped for the fire drill. As we passed the yard boxed in by that retaining wall, and the house after it, there was an open field. My wife gasped and pointed to the sky. Directly above us, so close I felt like I could reach up and touch it, was a large white puff of an exploded missile, the white trail of its exhaust arching and twisting back toward the south, toward Gaza.

Over the duration of those four weeks we ran to the safe room buck-naked out of the shower, we ran to the safe-room in the middle of dinner with pita and hummus still in our mouths, while watching Orange is the New Black, while playing with our kids at the park, while shopping at the mall, while breastfeeding, while out driving, while at daycare, while hanging laundry, while sleeping,…

Let me paraphrase an incident that happened sometime in the second week of the conflict: Outside of a Kibbutz in southern Israel, one of the ones where the Israel Defense Force (IDF) found a tunnel that Hamas had built from Gaza, under the borders and neutral territory separating Gaza from Israel, a girl and her mother were walking their dog. News casters saw the trio and interviewed them. They asked the girl, “Aren’t you scared?”

She said, “Why would I be, look at all the soldiers here. I’m safer today than I would be all the other days they aren’t here.”

The newscaster said, “So, are you angry about the situation?”

The girl said, “No. I feel sad for the people in Gaza who don’t want this. We know they don’t all want this. I hope they’re okay.”

Later the newscasters asked the mother how she felt about her daughter’s words. The mother looked nervous. She said, “I’m scared for her. I’m worried she’ll be harassed by people who are angry.” She meant that she was worried that her girl could be bullied and made a target by Israelis who are so enraged with Hamas, so hungry for Hamas’s demise that they can’t stand to hear the positive about any Palestinian, even the innocents.

There was a rumor going around that Hamas started the war with Israel for two reasons: 1) When Hamas is at war with Israel they don’t have to pay or feed the men and women who have dug the tunnels for them and housed and shot missiles out of their homes for Hamas leadership, and 2) Hamas wanted Israel to pressure Egypt to pay Hamas a ransom so that they can pay their workers the funds they used up on weapons and concrete.

Egypt refused to negotiate with Hamas and urged them to stop their foolishness.

Every time the UN or Gaza asked for a ceasefire, humanitarian or otherwise, it was a Hamas missile that broke the ceasefire.

I spoke on the phone with an acquaintance that lives in Be’er Sheva in the south. She is a German immigrant, has lived in Israel for over 20 years, and writes translated news out of Israel for a European readership. She recounted how, since 2009, there have been almost 6,000 missiles fired at the south of Israel from Gaza–that’s an average of three missiles a day for five years.

There isn’t a day that goes by that she doesn’t spend a few minutes inside of her safe room.

She told me, “I know it isn’t right, exactly, but I’m sick of it. I’m tired. The businesses here are suffering. The people are suffering, I am suffering. I don’t care what they have to do anymore, they just need to end it…If we have to live like this for an extra three months to get more than nine months of peace from Hamas, then so be it. I really don’t care, not anymore.”

Just the other day, in the south of Israel, a four year-old child was killed by a Gazan missile. And I can imagine that pro-Palestinians might say, “But over a thousand Palestinians in Gaza are dead. Why is one Israeli girl more important than all of the dead Palestinians?” To this I would note that Israel, far more than Hamas, values the cost of a life. For instance, Israel has built a defense system of missiles to protect its people; Hamas uses its people to protect its missiles.

For those who don’t understand what this means, know that the people in Gaza whose homes, hospitals and stores, are being used to house and shoot off Hamas missiles don’t necessarily want those missiles around their children, but Hamas makes them do it. When Israel sends fliers warning Palestinians that Israel is going to bomb their house or apartment building, Hamas orders the innocent people to stay so that they will have footage and death tolls to show the international community. Why, you may ask? So that “humanitarians” who are ignorant to the nuances of this conflict will cry out against Israel. (So, please, don’t be that guy/gal.)

My main point is this: Anyone who thinks of his- or her-self as a humanitarian, and is, therefore, pro-Palestinian is fine by me. There are bad things happening to Palestinians by the hands of Israelis, but those persons should check their agendas, and their propaganda. Palestinians are not innocent. Furthermore, being pro-Palestinian in the name of humanitarianism does not mean one is or should be anti-Israel. The fault in this conflict lies on the side of fanatic Islamists like Hamas, and those who fund and assist Hamas’s anti-semitic agenda. Being a pro-Palestinian humanitarian means that one should be anti-Hamas, and should leave Israel out of the equation until such time as they don’t have to live in fear of fanatic Islamists on a level that no one in the US can come close to understanding. After all, Israel is only trying to protect its people from an immediate threat, and in so doing, they have shown much more restraint than the Nazis showed them, and the Nazis had no provocation for their acts of genocide.

My mother in-law told me this one day: “When we used to live in Eilat, years ago, we would go to the place where is Gaza now. It is very beautiful place. We would go to the beaches, and the hotels, and we would swim and buy things from the shops. It was good for all the peoples. These were Arab towns in Gaza. But in those days there was no problems, they were people, we were people, no problems. And the beaches. Such beautiful, beautiful beaches.

“And now, what is Gaza?”

Since I started this essay I have looked back at my own words and deleted entire sections as I saw a ranting, raving, hateful lunatic appear between the paragraphs. I tried to eliminate this voice, but truthfully, by the end of my trip, as Israel was shooting targets in Gaza and killing innocent bystanders, I was hardly hesitant in any way. Three weeks under constant missile bombardment will take a toll on even the most tenacious psyche. Sure, I felt bad about the innocent people in Gaza: like the twenty-five Palestinians who marched out into the streets to peacefully protest Hamas’s aggression against Israel and were executed in broad daylight as a warning to the rest of those uppity-high-falutin’ Palestinians who think that protest is a legitimate form of expression under Hamas-style Islamic rule.

For those Palestinians, and those who want to live in peace, I am sorrowful. But for Hamas, and those who aid Hamas willingly–not at gunpoint or in fear of death–I have lost any and all remorse. And what I came to understand was that the cries of American and International “humanitarians,” when those cries are anti-Israel, are based on ignorance, or blindly religious/ethnic homogeneity. And it is to those who fit this bill that I wish to make my argument, to claim: there will be no peace so long as Hamas and organizations like it continue to exist, and furthermore; it is acceptable for a nation to defend itself against such a terribly infectious and viral enemy the same way you would expect your country to protect you in the face of a similar threat.

PS: The Huffington Post published a fantastic article, “7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict,” and I urge those who feel that I am being too harsh, or that I am ignorant to the multi-faceted nature of this conflict, to go ahead and read this brief but illuminating document.